The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Secret BattleThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Secret BattleAuthor: A. P. HerbertRelease date: February 4, 2011 [eBook #35164]Most recently updated: August 29, 2014Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET BATTLE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Secret BattleAuthor: A. P. HerbertRelease date: February 4, 2011 [eBook #35164]Most recently updated: August 29, 2014Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Title: The Secret Battle
Author: A. P. Herbert
Author: A. P. Herbert
Release date: February 4, 2011 [eBook #35164]Most recently updated: August 29, 2014
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET BATTLE ***
IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIII
I am going to write down some of the history of Harry Penrose, because I do not think full justice has been done to him, and because there must be many other young men of his kind who flung themselves into this war at the beginning of it, and have gone out of it after many sufferings with the unjust and ignorant condemnation of their fellows. At times, it may be, I shall seem to digress into the dreary commonplaces of all war-chronicles, but you will never understand the ruthless progression of Penrose's tragedy without some acquaintance with each chapter of his life in the army.
He joined the battalion only a few days before we left Plymouth for Gallipoli, a shy, intelligent-looking person, with smooth, freckled skin and quick, nervous movements; and although he was at once posted to my company we had not become at all intimate when we steamed at last into Mudros Bay. But he had interested me from the first, and at intervals in the busy routine of a troopship passing without escort through submarine waters, I had been watching him and delighting in his keenness and happy disposition.
It was not my first voyage through the Mediterranean, though it was the first I had made in a transport, and I liked to see my own earlier enthusiasm vividly reproduced in him. Cape Spartel and the first glimpse of Africa; Tangiers and Tarifa and all that magical hour's steaming through the narrow waters with the pink and white houses hiding under the hills; Gibraltar Town shimmering and asleep in the noonday sun; Malta and the bumboat women, carozzes swaying through the narrow, chattering streets; cool drinks at cafés in a babel of strange tongues; all these were to Penrose part of the authentic glamour of the East; and he said so. I might have told him, with the fatuous pomp of wider experience, that they were in truth but a very distant reflection of the genuine East; but I did not. For it was refreshing to see any one so frankly confessing to the sensations of adventure and romance. To other members of the officers' mess the spectacle of Gibraltar from the sea may have been more stimulating than the spectacle of Southend (though this is doubtful); but it is certain that few of them would have admitted the grave impeachment.
At Malta some of us spent an evening ashore, and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous little café, where two poor singing women strove vainly to make themselves heard above the pandemonium of clinked glasses and bawled orders; there we met many officers newly returned from the landing at Cape Helles, some of them with slight bodily wounds, but all of them with grievous injury staring out of their eyes. Those of them who would speak at all were voluble with anecdotes of horror and blood. Most of our own party had not yet lost the light-hearted mood in which men went to the war in those days; the 'picnic' illusion of war was not yet dispelled; also, individually, no doubt, we had that curious confidence of the unblooded soldier that none of these strange, terrible things could ever actually happen tous; we should for ever hang upon the pleasant fringes of war, sailing in strange seas, and drinking in strange towns, but never definitely entangled in the more crude and distasteful circumstances of battle. And if there were any of us with a secret consciousness that we deceived ourselves, to-night was no time to tear away the veil. Let there be lights and laughter and wine; to-morrow, if need be, let us be told how the wounded had drowned in the wired shallows, and reckon the toll of that unforgettable exploit and the terrors that were still at work. And so we would not be dragooned into seriousness by these messengers from the Peninsula; but rather, with no injury to their feelings, laughed at their croakings and continued to drink.
But Harry Penrose was different. He was all eagerness to hear every detail, hideous and heroic.
There was one officer present, from the 29th Division, a man about thirty, with a tanned, melancholy face and great solemn eyes, which, for all the horrors he related, seemed to have something yet more horrible hidden in their depths. Him Harry plied with questions, his reveller's mood flung impatiently aside; and the man seemed ready to tell him things, though from his occasional reservations and sorrowful smile I knew that he was pitying Harry for his youth, his eagerness and his ignorance.
Around us were the curses of overworked waiters, and the babble of loud conversations, and the smell of spilt beer; there were two officers uproariously drunk, and in the distance pathetic snatches of songs were heard from the struggling singer on the dais. We were in one of the first outposts of the Empire, and halfway to one of her greatest adventures. And this excited youth at my side was the only one of all that throng who was ready to hear the truth of it, and to speak of death. I lay emphasis on this incident, because it well illustrates his attitude towards the war at that time (which too many have now forgotten), and because I then first found the image which alone reflects the many curiosities of his personality.
He was like an imaginative, inquisitive child; a child that cherishes a secret gallery of pictures in its mind, and must continually be feeding this storehouse with new pictures of the unknown; that is not content with a vague outline of something that is to come, a dentist, or a visit, or a doll, but will not rest till the experience is safely put away in its place, a clear, uncompromising picture, to be taken down and played with at will.
Moreover, he had the fearlessness of a child—but I shall come to that later.
And so we came to Mudros, threading a placid way between the deceitful Aegean Islands. Harry loved them because they wore so green and inviting an aspect, and again I did not undeceive him and tell him how parched and austere, how barren of comfortable grass and shade he would find them on closer acquaintance. We steamed into Mudros Bay at the end of an unbelievable sunset; in the great harbour were gathered regiments of ships—battleship, cruiser, tramp, transport, and trawler, and as the sun sank into the western hills, the masts and the rigging of all of them were radiant with its last rays, while all their decks and hulls lay already in the soft blue dusk. There is something extraordinarily soothing in the almost imperceptible motion of a big steamer gliding at slow speed to her anchorage; as I leaned over the rail of the boat-deck and heard the tiny bugle-calls float across from the French or English warships, and watched the miniature crews at work upon their decks, I became aware that Penrose was similarly engaged close at hand, and it seemed to me an opportunity to learn something of the history of this strange young man.
Beginning with his delight in the voyage and all the marvellous romance of our surroundings, I led him on to speak of himself. Both his parents had died when he was a boy at school. They had left him enough to go to Oxford upon (without the help of the Exhibition he had won), and he had but just completed his second year there when the war broke out. For some mysterious reason he had immediately enlisted instead of applying for a commission, like his friends. I gathered—though not from anything he directly said—that he had had a hard time in the ranks. The majority of his companions in training had come down from the north with the first draft of Tynesiders; and though, God knows, the Tynesider as a fighting man has been unsurpassed in this war, they were a wild, rough crowd before they became soldiers, and I can understand that for a high-strung, sensitive boy of his type the intimate daily round of eating, talking, and sleeping with them, must have made large demands on his patriotism and grit. But he said it did him good; and it was only the pestering of his guardian and relations that after six months forced him to take a commission. He had a curious lack of confidence in his fitness to be an officer—a feeling which is deplorably absent in hundreds not half as fit as he was; but from what I had seen of his handling of his platoon on the voyage (and the men are difficult after a week or two at sea) I was able to assure him that he need have no qualms. He was, I discovered, pathetically full of military ambitions; he dreamed already, he confessed, of decorations and promotions and glorious charges. In short, he was like many another undergraduate officer of those days in his eagerness and readiness for sacrifice, but far removed from the common type in his romantic, imaginative outlook towards the war. 'Romantic' is the only word, I think, and it is melancholy for me to remember that even then I said to myself, 'I wonder how long the romance will last, my son.'
But I could not guess just how terrible was to be its decay.
We were not to be long at Mudros. For three days we lay in the sweltering heat of the great hill-circled bay, watching the warships come and go, and buying fruit from the little Greek sailing boats which fluttered round the harbour. These were days of hot anxiety about one's kit; hourly each officer reorganized and re-disposed his exiguous belongings, and re-weighed his valise, and jettisoned yet more precious articles of comfort, lest the weight regulations be violated and for the sake of an extra shirt the whole of one's equipment be cast into the sea by the mysterious figure we believed to watch over these things. Afterwards we found that all our care was in vain, and in the comfortless camps of the Peninsula bitterly bewailed the little luxuries we had needlessly left behind, now so unattainable. Down in the odorous troop-decks the men wrote long letters describing the battles in which they were already engaged, and the sound of quite mythical guns.
But on the third day came our sailing orders. In the evening a little trawler, promoted to the dignity of a fleet-sweeper, came alongside, and all the regiment of gross, overloaded figures, festooned with armament and bags of food, and strange, knobbly parcels, tumbled heavily over the side. Many men have written of the sailing of the first argosy of troopships from that bay; and by this time the spectacle of departing troops was an old one to the vessels there. But this did not diminish the quality of their farewells. All the King's ships 'manned ship' as we passed, and sent us a great wave of cheering that filled the heart with sadness and resolution.
In one of the French ships was a party of her crew high up somewhere above the deck, and they sang for us with astonishing accuracy and feeling the 'Chant du Départ'; so moving was this that even the stolid Northerners in our sweeper were stirred to make some more articulate acknowledgment than the official British cheer; and one old pitman, searching among his memories of some Lancashire music-hall, dug out a rough version of the 'Marseillaise.' By degrees all our men took up the tune and sang it mightily, with no suspicion of words; and the officers, not less timidly, joined in, and were proud of the men for what they had done. For many were moved in that moment who were never moved before. But while we were yet warm with cheering and the sense of knighthood, we cleared the boom and shivered a little in the breeze of the open sea.
The sun went down, and soon it was very cold in the sweeper: and in each man's heart I think there was a certain chill. There were no more songs, but the men whispered in small groups, or stood silent, shifting uneasily their wearisome packs. For now we were indeed cut on from civilization and committed to the unknown. The transport we had left seemed a very haven of comfort and security; one thought longingly of white tables in the saloon, and the unfriendly linen bags of bully-beef and biscuits we carried were concrete evidence of a new life. The war seemed no longer remote, and each of us realized indignantly that we were personally involved in it. So for a little all these soldiers had a period of serious thought unusual in the soldier's life. But as we neared the Peninsula the excitement and novelty and the prospect of exercising cramped limbs brought back valour and cheerfulness.
At Malta we had heard many tales of the still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire. But such terrors were not for us. There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of Cape Helles, all, I think, expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure quarter. But instead an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there. And there came over the water a strange musty smell; some said it was the smell of the dead, and some the smell of an incinerator; myself I do not know, but it was the smell of the Peninsula for ever, which no man can forget. We disembarked at a pier of rafts by theRiver Clyde, and stumbled eagerly ashore. And now we were in the very heart of heroic things. Nowhere, I think, was the new soldier plunged so suddenly into the genuine scenes of war as he was at Gallipoli; in France there was a long transition of training-camps and railway trains and billets, and he moved by easy gradations to the firing-line. But here, a few hours after a night in linen sheets, we stood suddenly on the very sand where, but three weeks before, those hideous machine-guns in the cliffs had mown down that astonishing party of April 25. And in that silver stillness it was difficult to believe.
We shambled off up the steady slope between two cliffs, marvelling that any men could have prevailed against so perfect a 'field of fire.' By now we were very tired, and it was heavy work labouring through the soft sand. Queer, Moorish-looking figures in white robes peered at us from dark corners, and here and there a man poked a tousled head from a hole in the ground, and blinked upon our progress. Some one remarked that it reminded him of nothing so much as the native camp at Earl's Court on a fine August evening, and that indeed was the effect.
After a little the stillness was broken by a sound which we could not conceal from ourselves was 'the distant rattle of musketry'; somewhere a gun fired startlingly; and now as we went each man felt vaguely that at any minute we might be plunged into the thick of a battle, laden as we were, and I think each man braced himself for a desperate struggle. Such is the effect of marching in the dark to an unknown destination. Soon we were halted in a piece of apparently waste land circled by trees, and ordered to dig ourselves a habitation at once, for 'in the morning' it was whispered 'the Turks search all this ground.' Everything was said in a kind of hoarse, mysterious whisper, presumably to conceal our observations from the ears of the Turks five miles away. But then we did not know they were five miles away; we had no idea where they were or where we were ourselves. Men glanced furtively at the North Star for guidance, and were pained to find that, contrary to their military teaching, it told them nothing. Even the digging was carried on a little stealthily till it was discovered that the Turks were not behind those trees. The digging was a comfort to the men, who, being pitmen, were now in their element; and the officers found solace in whispering to each other that magical communication about the prospective 'searching'; it was the first technical word they had used 'in the field,' and they were secretly proud to know what it meant.
In a little the dawn began, and the grey trees took shape; and the sun came up out of Asia, and we saw at last the little sugar-loaf peak of Achi Baba, absurdly pink and diminutive in the distance. A man's first frontal impression of that great rampart, with the outlying slopes masking the summit, was that it was disappointingly small; but when he had lived under and upon it for a while, day by day, it seemed to grow in menace and in bulk, and ultimately became a hideous, overpowering monster, pervading all his life; so that it worked upon men's nerves, and almost everywhere in the Peninsula they were painfully conscious that every movement they made could be watched from somewhere on that massive hill.
But now the kitchens had come, and there was breakfast and viscous, milkless tea. We discovered that all around our seeming solitude the earth had been peopled with sleepers, who now emerged from their holes; there was a stir of washing and cooking and singing, and the smoke went up from the wood fires in the clear, cool air. D Company officers made their camp under an olive-tree, with a view over the blue water to Samothrace and Imbros, and now in the early cool, before the sun had gathered his noonday malignity, it was very pleasant. At seven o'clock the 'searching' began. A mile away, on the northern cliffs, the first shell burst, stampeding a number of horses. The long-drawn warning scream and the final crash gave all the expectant battalion a faintly pleasurable thrill, and as each shell came a little nearer the sensation remained. No one was afraid; without the knowledge of experience no one could be seriously afraid on this cool, sunny morning in the grove of olive-trees. Those chill hours in the sweeper had been much more alarming. The common sensation was: 'At last I am really under fire; to-day I shall write home and tell them about it.' And then, when it seemed that the line on which the shells were falling must, if continued, pass through the middle of our camp, the firing mysteriously ceased.
Harry, I know, was disappointed; personally, I was pleased.
I learned more about Harry that afternoon. He had been much exhausted by the long night, but was now refreshed and filled with an almost childish enthusiasm by the pictorial attractions of the place. For this enthusiastic soul one thing only was lacking in the site of the camp: the rise of the hill which here runs down the centre of the Peninsula, hid from us the Dardanelles. These, he said, must immediately be viewed. It was a bright afternoon of blue skies and gentle air,—not yet had the dry north-east wind come to plague us with dust-clouds,—and all the vivid colours of the scene were unspoiled. We walked over the hill through the parched scrub, where lizards darted from under our feet and tortoises lay comatose in the scanty shade, and came to a kind of inland cliff, where the Turks had had many riflemen at the landing, for all the ground was littered with empty cartridges. And there was unfolded surely the most gorgeous panorama this war has provided for prosaic Englishmen to see. Below was a cool, inviting grove of imperial cypresses; all along the narrow strip between us and the shore lay the rest-lines of the French, where moved lazy figures in blue and red, and black Senegalese in many colours. To the left was the wide sweep of Morto Bay, and beyond the first section of Achi Baba rising to De Tott's Battery in terraces of olives and vines. But what caught the immediate eye, what we had come to see and had sailed hither to fight for, was that strip of unbelievably blue water before us, deep, generous blue, like a Chinese bowl. On the farther shore, towards the entrance to the Straits, we could see a wide green plain, and beyond and to the left, peak after peak of the mountains of Asia; and far away in the middle distance there was a glint of snow from some regal summit of the Anatolian Mountains.
That wide green plain was the Plain of Troy. The scarcity of classical scholars in Expeditionary Forces, and the wearisome observations of pressmen on the subject of Troy, have combined to belittle the significance of the classical surroundings of the Gallipoli campaign. I myself am a stolid, ill-read person, but I confess that the spectacle of those historic flats was not one, in diplomatic phrase, which I could view with indifference. On Harry, ridiculously excited already, the effect was almost alarming. He became quite lyrical over two little sweepers apparently anchored near the mouth of the Straits. 'That,' he said, 'must have been where the Greek fleet lay. God! it's wonderful.' Up on the slope towards De Tott's Battery the guns were busy, and now and then Asiatic Annie sent over a large shell from the region of Achilles' tomb, which burst ponderously in the sea off Cape Helles. And there we sat on the rough edge of the cliff and talked of Achilles and Hector and Diomed and Patroclus and the far-sounding bolts of Jove. I do not defend or exalt this action; but this is a truthful record of a man's personality, and I simply state what occurred. And I confess that with the best wish in the world I was myself becoming a little bored with Troy, when in the middle of a sentence he suddenly became silent and gazed across the Straits with a fixed, pinched look in his face, like a man who is reminded of some far-off calamity he had forgotten. For perhaps a minute he maintained this rigid aspect, and then as suddenly relaxed, murmuring in a tone of relentless determination, 'I will.' It was not in me not to inquire into the nature of this passionate intention, and somehow I induced him to explain.
It seemed that in spite of his genuine academic successes and a moderate popularity at school and at Oxford, he had suffered from early boyhood from a curious distrust of his own capacity in the face of anything he had to do. In a measure, no doubt, this had even contributed to his successes. For his nervousness took the form of an intimate, silent brooding over any ordeal that lay before him, whether it was a visit to his uncle, or 'Schools,' or a dance: he would lie awake for hours imagining all conceivable forms of error and failure and humiliation that might befall him in his endeavour. And though he was to this extent forewarned and forearmed, it must have been a painful process. And it explained to me the puzzling intervals of seeming melancholy which I had seen varying his usually cheerful demeanour.
'You remember last night,' he said, 'I had been detailed to look after the baggage when we disembarked, and take charge of the unloading-party? As far as I know I did the job all right, except for losing old Tompkins' valise—but you can't think how much worry and anxiety it gave mebeforehand. All the time on the sweeper I was imagining the hundreds of possible disasters: the working-party not turning up, and me left alone on the boat with the baggage—the Colonel's things being dropped overboard—a row with the M.L.O.—getting the baggage ashore, and then losing the battalion, or the working-party, or the baggage. It all worked out quite simply, but I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it's always the same. That's really why I didn't take a commission—because I couldn't imagine myself drilling men once without becoming a permanent laughing-stock. I know now that I was a fool about that—I usually do find that out—but I can't escape the feeling next time.
'And now, it's not only little things like that, but that's what I feel about the whole war. I've a terror of being a failure in it, a failure out here—you know, a sort of regimental dud. I've heard of lots of them; the kind of man that nobody gives an important job because he's sure to muck it up (though I do believe Eccleston's more likely to be that than me). But that's what I was thinking just now. Somehow, looking at this view—Troy and all that—and thinking how those Greeks sweated blood for ten years on afternoons like this, doing their duty for the damned old kings, and how we've come out here to fight in the same place thousands of years afterwards, and we still know about them and remember their names—well, it gave me a kind of inspiration; I don't know why. I've got a bit of confidence—God knows how long it will last—but I swear I won't be a failure, I won't be the battalion dud—and I'll have a damned good try to get a medal of some sort and be like—like Achilles or somebody.'
Sheer breathlessness put a sudden end to this outburst, and since it was followed by a certain shyness at his own revelations I did not probe deeper. But I thought to myself that this young man's spirit of romance would die hard; I did not know whether it would ever die; for certainly I had never seen that spirit working so powerfully in any man as a positive incentive to achievement. And I tell you all this, because I want you to understand how it was with him in the beginning.
But now the bay was in shadow below us; on the hill the solemn stillness that comes over all trenches in the hour before dusk had already descended, and away towards the cape the Indians were coming out to kneel in prayer beside the alien sea.
The Romance of War was in full song. And scrambling down the cliff, we bathed almost reverently in the Hellespont.
Those first three days were for many of us, who did not know the mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we won had already become in great part a wilderness; the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had fallen and died in April, had long been trodden to death, and there were wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and the foot-hills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, on the slopes of the bridge, was our camp fortunately set. The word 'camp' contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning's 'searching,' we were far from imagining that what we dug would be our Peninsular 'home' and haven of rest from the firing-line for many months to come. And so we made what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a quite temporary emergency—long, straight, untraversed ditches, running parallel to and with but a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling-place could conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out of his narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling parapet on to his sleeping neighbour in the next ditch; and three large German shells could have destroyed half the regiment. Yet there were many such camps, most of them lacking the grateful concealment of our trees. Such targets even the Turkish artillery must sometimes hit, There were no dug-outs in the accepted sense of the Western Front, no deep, elaborate, stair-cased chambers, hollowed out by miners with miners' material.Ourdug-outsweredug-outs in truth, shallow excavations scooped in the surface of the earth. The only roof for a man against sun and shells was a waterproof sheet stretched precariously over his hole. It is sufficient testimony to the indifference of the Turkish artillery that with such naked concentrations of men scattered about the Peninsula, casualties in the rest-camps were so few.
Each officer had his own private hole, set democratically among the men's; and an officers' mess was simply made by digging a larger hole, and roofing it withtwowaterproof sheets instead of one. There was no luxury among the infantry there, and the gulf which yawns between the lives of officer and man in France as regards material comfort was barely discernible in Gallipoli. Food was dull and monotonous: for weeks we had only bully-beef and biscuits, and a little coarse bacon and tea, but it was the same for all, one honourable equality of discomfort. At first there were no canteen facilities, and when some newcomer came from one of the islands with a bottle of champagne and another of chartreuse, we drank it with 'bully' and cast-iron biscuit. Drinking water was as precious as the elixir of life, and almost as unobtainable, but officer and man had the same ration to eke out through the thirsty day. Wells were sunk, and sometimes immediately condemned, and when we knew the water was clear and sweet to taste, it was hard to have it corrupted with the metallic flavour of chemicals by the medical staff. Then indeed did a man learn to love water; then did he learn discipline, when he filled his water-bottle in the morning with the exiguous ration of the day, and fought with the intolerable craving to put it to his lips and there and then gurgle down his fill.
In the spring nights it was very cold, and men shivered in their single blanket under the unimaginable stars; but very early the sun came up, and by five o'clock all the camp were singing; and there were three hours of fresh coolness when it was very good to wash in a canvas bucket, and smoke in the sun before the torrid time came on; and again at seven, when the sun sat perched on the great rock of Samothrace, and Imbros was set in a fleecy marvel of pink and saffron clouds, there were two hours of pure physical content; but these, I think, were more nearly perfect than the morning because they succeeded the irritable fevers of the day. Then the crickets in the branches sang less tediously, and the flies melted away, and all over the Peninsula the wood fires began to twinkle in the dusk, as the men cooked over a few sticks the little delicacies which were preserved for this hour of respite. When we had done we sat under our olive-tree in the clear twilight, and watched the last aeroplanes sail home to Rabbit Islands, and talked and argued till the glow-worms glimmering in the scrub, and up the hill the long roll of the Turks' rapid fire, told us that darkness was at hand, and the chill dew sent us into our crannies to sleep.
So we were not sorry for three days of quiet in the camp before we went up the hill; Harry alone was all eagerness to reach the firing-line with the least possible delay. But then Harry was like none of us; indeed, none of us were like each other. It would have been strange if we had been. War-chroniclers have noted with an accent of astonishment the strange diversity of persons to be found in units of the New Army, and the essential sameness of their attitude to the war. As though a man were to go into the Haymarket and be surprised if the first twelve pedestrians there were not of the same profession; were then to summon them to the assistance of a woman in the hands of a rough, and be still surprised at the similarity of their methods.
We were, in truth, a motley crowd, gathered from everywhere; but when we sat under that olive-tree we were very much alike—with the single exception of Harry.
Egerton, our company commander, a man of about thirty, with a round face and a large head, was a stockbroker by profession, and rather improbably, an old Territorial by pastime. He was an excellent company commander, but would have made a still more admirable second-in-command, for his training in figures and his meticulous habits in such things as the keeping of accounts were just what is required of a second-in-command, and were lamentably deficient in myself. The intricacies of Acquittance Rolls and Imprest Accounts, and page 3 of the Soldier's Pay-Book, were meat and drink to him, and in general I must confess that I shamefully surrendered such delicacies to him.
Harry Penrose had the 14th Platoon. Of the other three subalterns perhaps the most interesting was Hewett. He, like Harry, had been at Oxford before the war, though they had never come together there. He was a fair, dreamy person, of remarkably good looks. Alone of all the 'young Apollos' I have known did he at all deserve that title. Most of these have been men of surpassing stupidity and material tastes, but Hewett added to his physical qualifications something of the mental refinement which presumably one should expect of even a modern Apollo. Intensely fastidious, he frankly detested the war, and all the dirt and disgust he must personally encounter. Like Harry, he was an idealist—but more so; for he could not idealize the war. But the shrinking of his spirit had no effect on his conduct: he was no less courageous than Harry or any one else, and no less keen to see the thing through. Only, at that time, he was a little less blind. A year senior to Harry, he had taken Greats in 1914, and though his degree had been disappointingly low he had not yet lost the passionate attachment of the 'Greats' man to philosophy and thoughts of the Ultimate Truths. Sometimes he would try to induce one of us to talk with him of his religious and philosophical doubts; but in that feverish place it was too difficult for us, and usually he brooded over his problems alone.
Eustace, of the 16th Platoon, was a journalist by repute, though it was never discovered to what journal, if any, he was specially attached. His character was more attractive than his appearance, which was long, awkward, and angular; and if he had ever been to school, he would have been quite undeservedly unpopular for not playing games: undeservedly—because one could not conceive of him as playing any game. Physically, indeed, he was one of Nature's gawks; intellectually he was nimble, not to say athletic, with an acute and deeply logical mind. As a companion, more especially a companion in war, he was made tedious by a habit of cynicism and a passion for argument. The cynicism, I think, had developed originally from some early grievance against Society, had been adopted as an effective pose, and had now become part of his nature. Whatever its origin it was wearing to us, for in the actual scenes of war one likes to cling to one's illusions while any shred of them remains, and would rather they faded honourably under the gentle influence of time than be torn to fragments in a moment by reasoned mockery. But Eustace was never tired of exhibiting the frailty and subterfuge of all men, particularly in their relations to the war; theNationarrived for him as regularly as the German submarines would allow, and all his views were in that sense distinctly 'National.' If any of us were rash enough to read that paper ourselves, we were inevitably provoked to some comment which led to a hot wrangle on the Public Schools, or Kitchener, or the rights of the war, and the pleasant calm of the dusk was marred. For Eustace could always meet us with a powerfully logical case, and while in spirit we revolted against his heresies, we were distressed by the appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. Harry, the most ingenuous of us all and the most devoted to his illusions, was particularly worried by this conflict. It seemed very wrong to him that a man so loyal and gallant in his personal relations with others should trample so ruthlessly on their dearest opinions.
Burnett was of a very different type. Tall and muscular, with reddish hair and vivid blue eyes, he looked (as he wanted to look) a 'man of action' by nature and practice. He had 'knocked about' for some years in Africa and Australia (a process which had failed equally to establish his fortunes or soften his rough edges), and from the first he affected the patronizing attitude of the experienced campaigner. The little discomforts of camp life were nothing to him, for were they not part of his normal life? And when I emerged from my dug-out pursued by a centipede of incredible ferocity, he held forth for a long time on the best method of dispatching rattlesnakes in the Umgoga, or some such locality. By degrees, however, as life became more unbearable, the conviction dawned upon us that he was no less sensible to heat and hunger and thirst than mere 'temporary' campaigners, and rather more ready to utter his complaints. Finally, the weight of evidence became overwhelming, and it was whispered at the end of our first week at Gallipoli that 'Burnett was bogus.' The quality of being 'bogus' was in those days the last word in military condemnation; and in Burnett's case events showed the verdict to be lamentably correct.
So we were a strangely assorted crowd, only alike, as I have said, in that we were keen on the winning of this war and resolved to do our personal best towards that end. Of the five of us, Hewett and Eustace had the most influence on Harry. Me he regarded as a solid kind of wall that would never let him down, or be guilty of any startling deviations from the normal. By Hewett he was personally and spiritually attracted; by Eustace alternately fascinated and disturbed. And it was a very bad day for Harry when Hewett's death removed that gentle, comfortable influence.
We were ordered to relieve the ——'s at midnight on the fourth day, and once again we braced ourselves for the last desperate battle of our lives. All soldiers go through this process during their first weeks of active service every time they 'move' anywhere. Immense expectations, vows, fears, prayers, fill their minds; and nothing particular happens. Only the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and not the rule for anything particular to happen; and the heroes of romance and history who do not move a muscle when told that they are to attack at dawn are generally quite undeserving of praise, since long experience has taught them that the attack is many times more likely to be cancelled than to occur. Until it actually does happen they will not believe in it; they make all proper preparations, but quite rightly do not move a muscle. We, however, were now to have our first illustration of this great military truth. For, indeed, we were to have no battle. Yet that night's march to the trenches was an experience that made full compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of the rest-camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in new units, the leading platoons went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after them in the gathering shadows over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and out of the clumps of bush, falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands of wire, the rear companies were speedily out of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman there are few things more exasperating than a night march into the line conducted too fast. If the country be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait while another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades in front of him, and must then laboriously scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and thereby all those behind him, be lost; if the country be unknown to him, so that, apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being lost is no small thing, for a man knows that he may wander all night alone in the dark, surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep, and rations, and the friendly voices of companions, a jest among them when he discovers them: then such a march becomes a nightmare.
On this night it dawned gradually on those in front that they were unaccompanied save by the 1st platoon, and a long halt, and much shouting and searching, gathered most of the regiment together, hot, cursing, and already exhausted. And now we passed the five white Water Towers, standing mysteriously in a swamp, and came out of the open country into the beginning of a gully. These 'gullies' were deep, steep-sided ravines, driven through all the lower slopes of Achi Baba, and carrying in the spring a thin stream of water, peopled by many frogs, down to the Straits or the sea. It was easier going here, for there was a rough track beside the stream to follow; yet, though those in front were marching, as they thought, with inconceivable deliberation, the rear men of each platoon were doubling round the corners among the trees, and cursing as they ran. There was then a wild hail of bullets in all those gullies, since for many hours of each night the Turk kept up a sustained and terrible rapid fire from his trenches far up the hill, and, whether by design or bad shooting, the majority of these bullets passed high over our trenches, and fell hissing in the gully-bed.
So now all the air seemed full of the humming, whistling things, and all round in the gully-banks and the bushes by the stream there were vicious spurts as they fell. It was always a marvel how few casualties were caused by this stray fire, and to-night we were chiefly impressed with this wonder. In the stream the frogs croaked incessantly with a note of weary indifference to the medley of competing noises. At one point there was a kind of pot-hole in the stream where the water squeezing through made a kind of high-toned wail, delivered with stabbing emphasis at regular intervals. So weird was this sound, which could be heard many hundred yards away, and gradually asserted itself above all other contributions to that terrible din, that many of the men, already mystified and excited, said to themselves that this was the noise of the hideous explosive bullets of which they had heard.
Soon we were compelled to climb out of the gully-path to make way for some descending troops, and stumbled forward with a curious feeling of nakedness high up in open ground. Here the bullets were many times multiplied, and many of us said that we could feel them passing between us. Indeed, one or two men were hit, but though we did not know it, most of these near-sounding bullets flew high above us. After a little we were halted, and lay down, wondering, in the sibilant dark; then we moved on and halted again, and realized suddenly that we were very tired. At the head of the column the guide had lost his way, and could not find the entrance to the communication trench; and here in the most exposed area of all that Peninsula we must wait until he did. The march was an avoidable piece of mismanagement; the whole regiment was being unnecessarily endangered. But none of this we knew; so very few men were afraid. For we were still in the bliss of ignorance. It seemed to us that these strange proceedings must be a part of the everyday life of the soldier. If they were not, we raw creatures should not have been asked to endure them. We had no standard of safety or danger by which to estimate our position; and so the miraculous immunity we were enjoying was taken as a matter of course, and we were blissfully unafraid. At the same time we were extremely bored and tired, and the sweat cooled on us in the chill night air. And when at last we came into the deep communication trench we felt that the end of this weariness must surely be near. But the worst exasperations of relieving an unknown line were still before us. It was a two-mile trudge in the narrow ditches to the front line. No war correspondent has ever described such a march; it is not included in the official 'horrors of war'; but this is the kind of thing which, more than battle and blood, harasses the spirit of the infantryman, and composes his life. The communication trenches that night were good and deep and dry, and free from the awfulness of mud; but they were very few, and unintelligently used. There had been an attack that day, and coming by the same trench was a long stream of stretchers and wounded men, and odd parties coming to fetch water from the well, and whole battalions relieved from other parts of the line. Our men had been sent up insanely with full packs; for a man so equipped to pass another naked in the narrow ditch would have been difficult; when all those that he meets have also straps and hooks and excrescences about them, each separate encounter means heartbreaking entanglements and squeezes and sudden paroxysms of rage. That night we stood a total of hours hopelessly jammed in the suffocating trench, with other troops trying to get down. A man stood in those crushes, unable to sit down, unable to lean comfortably against the wall because of his pack, unable even to get his hand to his water-bottle and quench his intolerable thirst, unable almost to breathe for the hot smell of herded humanity. Only a thin ribbon of stars overhead, remotely roofing his prison, reminded him that indeed he was still in the living world and not pursuing some hideous nightmare. At long last some one would take charge of the situation, and by sheer muscular fighting for space the two masses would be extricated. Then one moved on again. And now each man has become a mere lifeless automaton. Every few yards there is a wire hanging across the trench at the height of a man's eyes, and he runs blindly into it, or it catches in the piling-swivel of his rifle; painfully he removes it, or in a fit of fury tears the wire away with him. Or there is a man lying in a corner with a wounded leg crying out to each passer-by not to tread on him, or a stretcher party slowly struggling against the tide. Mechanically each man grapples with these obstacles, mechanically repeats the ceaseless messages that are passed up and down, and the warning 'Wire,' 'Stretcher party', 'Step up,' to those behind, and stumbles on. He is only conscious of the dead weight of his load, and the braces of his pack biting into his shoulders, of his thirst, and the sweat of his body, and the longing to lie down and sleep. When we halt men fall into a doze as they stand, and curse pitifully when they are urged on from behind.
We reach the inhabited part of the line, and the obstacles become more frequent, for there are traverses every ten yards and men sleeping on the floor, and a litter of rifles, water-cans, and scattered equipment. For ever we wind round the endless traverses, and squeeze past the endless host we are relieving; and sometimes the parapet is low or broken or thin, or there is a dangerous gap, and we are told to keep our heads down, and dully pass back the message so that it reaches men meaninglessly when they have passed the danger-point, or are still far from it. All the time there is a wild rattle of rapid fire from the Turks, and bullets hammer irritably on the parapet, or fly singing overhead. When a man reached his destined part of the trench that night there were still long minutes of exasperation before him; for we were inexperienced troops, and first of all the men crowded in too far together, and must turn about, and press back so as to cover the whole ground to be garrisoned; then they would flock like sad sheep too far in the opposite direction. This was the subaltern's bad time; for the officer must squeeze backwards and forwards, struggling to dispose properly his own sullen platoon, and it was hard for him to be patient with their stupidity, for, like them, he only longed to fling off his cursed equipment and lie down and sleep for ever. He, like them, had but one thought, that if there were to be no release from the hateful burden that clung to his back, and cut into his shoulders and ceaselessly impeded him, if there were to be no relief for his thirst and the urgent aching of all his body—he must soon sink down and scream....
Harry's platoon was settled in when I found him, hidden away somewhere in the third (Reserve) line. He had conscientiously posted a few sentries, and done all those things which a good platoon commander should do, and was lying himself in a sort of stupor of fatigue. Physically he was not strong, rather frail, in fact, for the infantry; he had a narrow chest and slightly round shoulders, and his heart would not have passed any civilian doctor; and—from my own experience—I knew that the march must have tried him terribly. But a little rest had soothed the intense nervous irritation whose origins I have tried to describe, and his spirit was as sturdy as ever. He struggled to his feet and leaned over the parados with me. The moon was now high up in the north-east; the Turks had ceased their rapid fire at moonrise, and now an immense peace wrapped the Peninsula. We were high up on the centre slopes of Achi Baba, and all the six miles which other men had conquered lay bathed in moonlight below us. Far away at the cape we could see the long, green lights of the hospital ships, and all about us were glow-worms in the scrub. Left and right the pale parapets of trenches crept like dim-seen snakes into the little valleys, and vanished over the opposite slopes. Only a cruiser off shore firing lazily at long intervals disturbed the slumberous stillness. No better sedative could have been desired.
'How did you like the march?' I said.
'Oh, all right; one of my men was wounded, I believe, but I didn't see him.'
'All right?' I said. 'Personally I thought it was damned awful; it's a marvel that any of us are here at all. I hear A Company's still adrift, as it is.'
'Well, anyhowwegot here,' said Harry. 'What a wonderful spot this is. And look at those damned glow-worms.'
I was anxious to know what impression the night had made on Harry, but these and other answers gave me no real clue. I had a suspicion that it had, in truth, considerably distressed him, but any such effect had clearly given way to the romantic appeal of the quiet moon. I, too, was enjoying the sense of peace, but I was still acutely conscious of the unpleasantness of the night's proceedings; and a certain envy took hold of me at this youth's capacity to concentrate on the attractive shadow of distasteful things. There was a heavy, musty smell over all this part of the trench, the smell of a dead Turk lying just over the parapet, and it occurred to me, maliciously, to wake Harry from his dreams, and bring home to him the reality of things.
'Funny smell you've got here, Harry,' I said; 'know what it is?'
'Yes, it's cactus or amaryllis, or one of those funny plants they have here, isn't it? I read about it in the papers.'
This was too much. 'It's a dead Turk,' I told him, with a wicked anticipation of the effect I should produce.
The effect, however, was not what I expected.
'No!' said Harry, with obvious elation. 'Let's find the devil.'
Forthwith he swarmed over the parapet, full of life again, nosed about till he found the reeking thing, and gazed on it with undisguised interest. No sign of horror or disgust could I detect in him. Yet it was not pure ghoulishness; it was simply the boy's greed for experience and the savour of adventure. Anyhow, my experiment had failed; and I found that I was glad. But when I was leaving him for the next platoon, he was lying down for a little sleep on the dirty floor of the trench, and as he flashed his electric torch over the ground, I saw several small white objects writhing in the dust. The company commander whom we had relieved had told me how under all these trenches the Turks and the French had buried many of their dead, and in a moment of nauseating insight I knew that these things were the maggots which fed upon their bodies.
'Harry,' I said, 'you can't sleep there; look at those things!' And I told him what they were.
'Rubbish,' he said, 'they're glow-worms gone to sleep.'
Well, then I left him. But that's how he was in those days.
So many men have written descriptions of trench life in France; there have been so many poems, plays, and speeches about it that the majority of our nation must have a much clearer mental picture of life on the Western Front than they have of life at the Savoy, or life in East Ham. But the Gallipoli Peninsula was never part of the Western Front, and no man came back from that place on leave; lucky, indeed, if he came at all. The campaign was never, for obvious reasons, an important item in official propaganda, and the various non-official agencies which now bring home the war to Streatham had not begun to articulate when the campaign came to an end. And so neither Streatham nor any one else knew anything about it. And though for a soldier to speak, however distantly, of the details of trench life in France, is now in some circles considered a solecism equivalent to the talking of 'shop,' I hope I may still without offence make some brief reference to the trenches of the Peninsula. For, in truth, it was all very different. Above all, from dawn to dawn it was genuine infantry warfare. In France, apart from full-dress attacks, an infantryman may live for many months without once firing his rifle, or running the remotest risk of death by a rifle bullet. Patiently he tramps, and watches, and digs, and is shelled, clinging fondly to his rifle night and day, but seldom or never in a position to use it; so that in the stagnant days of the past he came to look upon it as a mere part of his equipment, like his water-bottle, only heavier and less comforting; and in real emergencies fumbled stupidly with the unfamiliar mechanism. This was true for a long time of the normal, or 'peace-time,' sectors of France.
But in those hill-trenches of Gallipoli the Turk and the Gentile fought with each other all day with rifle and bomb, and in the evening crept out and stabbed each other in the dark. There was no release from the strain of watching and listening and taking thought. The Turk was always on higher ground; he knew every inch of all those valleys and vineyards and scrub-strewn slopes; and he had an uncanny accuracy of aim. Moreover, many of his men had the devotion of fanatics, which inspired them to lie out behind our lines, with stores of food enough to last out their ammunition, certain only of their own ultimate destruction, but content to lie there and pick off the infidels till they too died. They were very brave men. But the Turkish snipers were not confined to the madmen who were caught disguised as trees in the broad daylight and found their way into the picture papers. Every trench was full of snipers, less theatrical, but no less effective. And in the night they crept out with unbelievable stealth and lay close in to our lines, killing our sentries, and chipping away our crumbling parapets.
So the sniping was terrible. In that first week we lost twelve men each day; they fell without a sound in the early morning as they stood up from their cooking at the brazier, fell shot through the head, and lay snoring horribly in the dust; they were sniped as they came up the communication trench with water, or carelessly raised their heads to look back at the ships in the bay; and in the night there were sudden screams where a sentry had moved his head too often against the moon. If a periscope were raised, however furtively, it was shivered in an instant; if a man peered over himself, he was dead. Far back in the Reserve Lines or at the wells, where a man thought himself hidden from view, the sniper saw and killed him. All along the line were danger-posts where many had been hit; these places became invested with a peculiar awe, and as you came to them the men said, 'Keep low here, sir,' in a mysterious whisper, as though the Turk could hear them. Indeed, so uncanny were many of the deaths, that some men said the Turk could see impossibly through the walls of the trench, and crouched nervously in the bottom. All the long communication trenches were watched, and wherever a head or a moving rifle showed at a gap a bullet came with automatic regularity. Going down a communication-trench alone a man would hear the tap of these bullets on the parapet following him along, and break into a half-hysterical run in the bright sunlight to get away from this unnatural pursuit; for such it seemed to him to be.
The fire seemed to come from all angles; and units bitterly accused their neighbours of killing their men when it seemed impossible that any Turk could have fired the shot.
For a little, then, this sniping was thoroughly on the men's nerves. Nothing in their training had prepared them for it. They hated the 'blinded' feeling it produced; it was demoralizing always to be wondering if one's head was low enough, always to walk with a stoop; it was tiring to be always taking care; and it was very dangerous to relax that care for a moment. Something had to be done; and the heavy, methodical way in which these Tynesiders of ours learned to counter and finally overcome the sniper, is characteristic of the nation's effort throughout this war. The Turks were natural soldiers, fighting in their own country; more, they were natural scouts. Our men were ponderous, uncouth pitmen from Tyneside and the Clyde. But we chose out a small body of them who could shoot better than their fellows, and called them snipers, and behold, theyweresnipers. We gave them telescopes, and periscopes, and observers, and set them in odd corners, and told them to snipe. And by slow degrees they became interested and active and expert, and killed many Turks. The third time we came to those trenches we could move about with comparative freedom.
In all this Harry took a leading part, for the battalion scout officer was one of the first casualties, and Harry, who had had some training as a scout in the ranks, was appointed in his place. In this capacity he was in charge of the improvised snipers, and all day moved about the line from post to post, encouraging and correcting. All this he did with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, and tired himself out with long wanderings in the scorching sun. In those trenches all movement was an intense labour. The sun blazed always into the suffocating ditch, where no breath of air came; the men not on duty lay huddled wherever they could steal an inch of shade, with the flies crawling about their eyes and open mouths. Progress was a weary routine of squeezing past men, or stepping over men, or running into men round corners, as one stooped to escape death. In little niches in the wall were mess-tins boiling over box-wood fires, so that the eyes smarted from their smoke, and the air was full of the hot fumes; and everywhere was the stuffy smell of human flesh. In the heat of the day these things produced in the healthiest man an intolerable irritation and fatigue: to a frail, sensitive youth like Harry his day-long rambles must have been torture; but though he too became touchy he pursued his task with determination, and would not be tempted away. The rest of us, when not on watch, lay torpid all the hot hours in the shallow holes we had scratched behind the trench, and called Company Headquarters. These places were roofed only with the inevitable waterproof sheet, and, had there been any serious shelling, would have been death-traps. Into these dwellings came many strange animals, driven from their nests among the roots of the scrub—snakes, lizards, and hideous centipedes. Large, clumsy, winged things, which some said were locusts, fell into the trench, and for a few hours strove vainly to leap out again till they were trampled to death; they had the colour of ivory, and shone with bright tints in the sun like shot silk. The men found tortoises derelict in near shell-holes, and set them to walk in the trench, and they too wandered sadly about till they disappeared, no man knew where. The flies were not yet at full strength, but they were very bad; and all day we wrestled with thirst. He was a lucky man who could sleep in the daylight hours, and when the cool evening came, beckoning him to sleep, he must rise and bestir himself for the work of the night.
Then all the line stirred with life again, with the cleaning of rifles thick with heavy dust, and the bustle of men making ready to 'Stand to Arms.' Now, indeed, could a man have slept when all the pests of the day had been exorcized by the cool dusk, and the bitter cold of the midnight was not yet come. But there was no sleep for any man, only watching and digging and carrying and working and listening. And so soon as Achi Baba was swathed in shadow, and the sun well down behind the westward islands, the Turk began his evening fusillade of rapid fire. This was an astonishing performance. Night after night at this hour every man in his trench must have blazed away till his rifle would do its work no more. 'Rapid fire' has been a speciality of the Turkish infantryman since the days of Plevna, and indeed he excels in it. Few English units could equal his performance for ten minutes; but the Turk kept up the same sustained deafening volume of fire for hours at a stretch, till the moon came up and allayed his fears. For it was an exhibition of nervousness as well as musketry: fearful of a stealthy assault in the dark, he would not desist till he could see well across his own wire. Captured orders by the Turkish High Command repeatedly forbade this reckless expenditure of ammunition, and sometimes for two nights he would restrain himself, but in the early days never for more. Our policy was to lie down in the trench, and think sardonically of the ammunition he was wasting; but even this was not good for men's minds. Most of the fire was high and whizzed over into the gullies, but many hundreds of all those thousands of bullets hit the parapet. There was a steady, reiterant rap of them on the sand-bags, very irritating to the nerves, and bits of the parapet splashed viciously into the trench over the crouching men. In that tornado of sound a man must shout to make himself heard by his friends, and this produced in his mind an uncomfortable sense of isolation; he seemed cut off from humanity, and brooded secretly to himself. Safe he might be in that trench, but he could not long sit alone in that tempestuous security without imagining himself in other circumstances—climbing up the parapet—leaving the trench—walking intoTHAT. So on the few murky nights when the moon would not show herself but peeped temptingly from behind large bolsters of cloud, so that even the Turks diminished their fire, and then with a petulant crescendo continued, men lay in the dust and prayed for the moon to come. So demoralizing was this fire that it was not easy to induce even sentries to keep an effective watch. Not unnaturally, they did not like lifting their heads to look over, even for the periodical peeps which were insisted upon. An officer on his rounds would find them standing on the firestep with their heads well below the parapet, but gazing intently into the heart of a sand-bag, with the air of a man whom no movement of the enemy can escape. The officer must then perform the melancholy rite of 'showing the man how safe it is.' This consisted in climbing up to the firestep, and exposing an immoderate amount of his head; gazing deliberately at the Turks, and striving to create an impression of indifference and calm. He then jumped down, shouting cheerily, 'That's the way, Thompson,' and walked off, thanking God. Personally I did not like this duty. At the best it was an hypocrisy. For the reluctance of the officer to look over was no less acute than the man's; and it was one thing to look for a moment or two and pass on, and another to stand there and repeat the process at brief intervals. Officers performed this rite according to their several characters: Eustace, for example, with a cynical grin which derided, with equal injustice, both himself and his action; he was notably courageous, and his nonchalance on the parapet would have been definitely reassuring to the nervous sentry. But his expression and attitude said clearly: 'This is all damned nonsense, my good man;youdon't like standing up here, neither do I, and neither of us is deceiving the other at all.' Burnett did it with genuine and ill-concealed distaste, too hasty to be convincing. Harry, alone, did it with a gallant abandon, like a knight throwing down his challenge to the enemy; and he alone can have been really inspiring to the reluctant sentry. He had a keen dramatic instinct, and in these little scenes rather enjoyed the part of the unperturbed hero calming the timorous herd. Watching him once or twice I wondered how much was acting and how much real fearlessness; if it was acting he was braver then than most of us—but I think it was the other just then.
There were five or six hours between the end of the rapid fire and the 'Stand to' before dawn. During these hours three of the company officers were always on duty. We split the time in two, and it was a weary three hours patrolling the still trench, stumbling over sleeping men, sprawled out like dead in the moonlight, and goading the tired sentries to watchfulness. Terrible was the want of sleep. The men fell asleep with their heads against the iron loopholes, and, starting up as the officer shook them, swore that they had never nodded. Only by constant movement could the officer be sure even of himself; he dared not sit for a moment or lean in the corner of the traverse, though all his limbs ached for rest, lest he, too, be found snoring at his post, and he and all his men be butchered in their guilty sleep. And so he drags his sore feet ceaselessly backwards and forwards, marvelling at the stillness and the stars and the strange, musky night smell which has crept out of the earth. Far away he can see the green lights of a hospital ship, and as he looks they begin to move and dwindle slowly into the distance, for she is going home; and he thinks of the warmth and light and comfort in that ship, and follows her wistfully with his eyes till she is gone. Turning back he sees a sentry, silent above him; he, too, is watching the ship, and each man knows the other's thoughts, but they do not speak.
At last comes the officer relieving him; cold and irritable from his brief sleep. He is a little late, and they compare watches resentfully; and unless they be firm friends, at that moment they hate each other. But the one who is relieved goes down to the dug-out in the Support Line, a little jauntily now, though his feet are painful, feeling already that he could watch many hours more. And suddenly the moon is beautiful, and the stars are friendly—for he is going to sleep. But when he comes to the little narrow hole, which is the dug-out, there are two officers already filling most of the floor, noisily asleep. One of them is lying on his waterproof sheet: he tugs angrily at it, but it is caught in something and will not come away. He shakes the man, but he does not wake. Too tired to continue he lies down awkwardly in the crooked space which is left between the legs and arms and equipment of the others. He draws his meagre trench-coat over his body, and pulls his knees up that they, too, may be covered; there is nothing over his feet, and already they are cold. His head he rests on a rough army haversack. In the middle of it there is a hard knob, a soap-tin, or a book, or a tin of beef. For a little he lies uncomfortably like this, hoping for sleep; his ear is crushed on the hard pillow; there is something knobbly under his hip. He knows that he ought to get up and re-arrange himself—but he lacks the necessary energy. Finally he raises himself on his elbow and tugs at the towel in his haversack to make him a pillow; the strap of the haversack is fastened, and the towel will not emerge. He unfastens the haversack, and in desperation pulls out the whole of its contents with the towel. His toothbrush and his sponge and his diary are scattered in the dust. Some of the pages of the diary are loose, and if he leaves it they will be lost; he feels in the darkness for his electric torch, and curses because he cannot find it. He has lent it to the damned fool who relieved him. Why can't people have things of their own?
Painfully groping he gathers his belongings and puts them, one by one, in the haversack, arranging his towel on the top. His elbow is sore with leaning on it, but the pillow is ready. Lying down again he falls quickly to sleep. Almost at once there is a wild din in his dreams. Rapid fire again. Springing up, he rushes into the trench with the others. It is an attack. Who is attacking? The men in the trench know nothing. It started on the right, they say, and now the whole line is ablaze again with this maddening rifle-fire. Running back to the dug-out he gropes in the wreckage of coats and equipment for his belt and revolver. He must hurry to the front line to take charge of his platoon. There are no telephones to the firing-line. What the hell is happening? When he is halfway up the communication trench, cannoning into the walls in his haste and weariness, the firing suddenly stops. It was a wild panic started by the Senegalese holding the line on our right. Damn them—black idiots!
He goes back swearing with the other officers, and they lie down anyhow; it is too late now to waste time on fussy arrangements. When he wakes up again there is already a hint of light in the East. It is the 'Stand to Arms' before dawn. His feet are numb and painful with cold, his limbs are cramped and aching, and his right forearm has gone to sleep. The flesh of his legs is clammy, and sticks to the breeches he has lived and slept in for five days: he longs for a bath. Slowly with the others he raises himself and gropes weakly in the muddle of garments on the floor for his equipment. He cannot find his revolver. Burnett has lost his belt, and mutters angrily to himself. All their belongings are entangled together in the narrow space; they disengage them without speaking to each other. Each one is in a dull coma of endurance; for the moment their spirit is at its lowest ebb; it is the most awful moment of warfare. In a little they will revive, but just now they cannot pretend to bravery or cheerfulness, only curse feebly and fumble in the darkness.
They go out into the trench and join their platoons. The N.C.O.'s are still shaking and bullying the men still asleep; some of these are almost senseless, and can only be roused by prolonged physical violence. The officer braces himself for his duties, and by and by all the men are more or less awake and equipped, though their heads droop as they sit, and their neighbours nudge them into wakefulness as the officer approaches. Mechanically he fills and lights a pipe, and takes a cautious sip at his water-bottle; the pipe turns his empty stomach, and an intolerable emptiness assails him. He knocks out the pipe and peers over the parapet. It is almost light now, but a thin mist hides the Turkish trench. His face is greasy and taut with dirt, and the corners of his eyes are full of dust; his throat is dry, and there is a loathsome stubble on his chin, which he fingers absently, pulling at the long hairs.
Steadily the light grows and grows, and the men begin to chatter, and suddenly the sun emerges over the corner of Achi Baba, and life and warmth come back to the numb souls of all these men. 'Stand to' is over; but as the men tear off their hateful equipment and lean their rifles against the wall of the trench there is a sudden burst of shelling on the right. Figures appear running on the skyline. They are against the light, and the shapes are dark, but there seems to be a dirty blue in their uniforms. No one quite knows how the line runs up there; it is a salient. The figures must be Turks attacking the French. The men gape over the parapet. The officer gapes. It is nothing to do with them. Then he remembers what he is for, and tells his men excitedly to fire on the figures. Some of the men have begun cooking their breakfast, and are with difficulty seduced from their task. A spasmodic fire opens on the running figures. It is hard to say where they are running, or what they are doing. The officer is puzzled. It is his first glimpse of battle, and he feels that a battle should be simple and easy to understand. The officer of the next platoon comes along. He is equally ignorant of affairs, but he thinks the figures are French, attacking the Turks. They, too, wear blue. The first officer rushes down the line telling the men to 'cease fire.' The men growl and go back to their cooking. It is fairly certain that none of them hit any of the distant figures, but the officer is worried. Why was nobody told what was to happen? What is it all about? He has been put in a false position. Presently a belated chit arrives to say that the French were to attack at sunrise, but the attack was a fiasco, and is postponed.
And now all the air is sickly with the smell of cooking, and the dry wood crackles in every corner; little wisps of smoke go straight up in the still air. All the Peninsula is beautiful in the sunlight, and wonderful to look upon against the dark blue of the sea; the dew sparkles on the scrub; over the cypress grove comes the first aeroplane, humming contentedly. Another day has begun; the officer goes down whistling to wash in a bucket.